Village Improvements and Farm Villages

by George E. Waring

Under the present system the women have the worst of it. They have the confinement and seclusion and dulness. Under the village system the men would have the discomfort, and this is why it will be less easy to secure its adoption; for the men control, and prefer not to have the heavy end of life's log to carry.

Under either of the plans given herewith, the greatest—not the average—distance from the house to the farm would be about one mile, and it would have to be travelled only during the working weather of the warmer months, and during the good wheeling of winter. In summer, all hands would have to set off early, and come home late, often carrying their dinner with them as mechanics do; but when field-work did not call them out, as during rains, or when the ground is too wet to be disturbed, their barn-work and shop-work would be at home; and, all the winter through, the only road-work to be done would be to send the teams to haul out the manure, and to bring home the hay, which would be best stored under "Dutch hay-barracks" in the fields when it was made. This work would be systematic and simple; and it may fairly be questioned whether it would not, in many cases, amount to less than the cost of the "driving" that is now done, and which in the village might be foregone. Especially would this be the case when all the heavy farm-work is done by oxen, which when idle, instead of eating their heads off like horses, are accumulating valuable flesh. With sufficient ox-power to do the work easily, the whole transportation of tools and men, and all the hay-tedding and hay-raking, would be easily done by one horse, with leeway enough to allow for a fair amount of business or pleasure travel.

So far as the presence of the farmer himself is concerned, it is to be considered that if his farm and cattle are near his house in the village, he will be within easy reach of them very often at times when his visits to the distant town would take him away from them if they were on the farm. In the village, during the whole winter, and in bad weather at other seasons, he would have little necessity or temptation to absent himself from home. Indeed, those who have had an opportunity to watch the life of the exceptional farmers whose houses and barns and stables are in a village cannot have failed to notice how much more home-like and engaging is the whole farm establishment than it usually is in the country. It is hardly too much to say that the few instances that we have, as in the farm-villages of New England, show that these village-living farmers are apparently more attentive to their home duties than are their isolated brethren, at least in the matter of tidiness.

To complete the comparison with the merchant or manufacturer, who takes his papers or plans home with him for work out of regular hours, one might say that the farmer who lives at a distance from his land, with his flocks and herds gathered about his homestead, has such of his work as needs early and late attention close at hand, while his regular workshop, the farm, calls him away for certain regular hours and regular duties.

It is not worth while here to enter into the details of the question. They are of serious moment, and involve among other things the driving of animals to and from pasture, versus the raising of soiling crops to be fed in the stall or yard. All of these questions have been satisfactorily solved in the experience of many exceptional cases in this country, and of the almost universal conditions obtaining in Europe. They present no practical difficulty, and need constitute no serious objection to the general plan.

The items of economical working and money-making being fully weighed, the more serious considerations of the mode of life, and the good to be got from it, demand even greater attention. It may seem a strange doctrine to be advanced by a somewhat enthusiastic farmer, but it is a doctrine that has been slowly accepted after many years' observation, a conviction that has taken possession of an unwilling mind, that the young man who takes his young wife to an isolated farmhouse dooms her and himself and their children to an unwholesome, unsatisfactory, and vacant existence,—an existence marked by the absence of those more satisfying and more cultivating influences which the best development of character and intelligence demand. It is a common experience of farmers' wives to pass week after week without exchanging a word or a look with a single person outside of their own family circles.

The young couple start bravely, and with a determination to struggle against the habit of isolation which marks their class. But this habit has grown from the necessity of the situation; and the necessities of their own situation bring them sooner or later within its bonds. During the first few years they adhere to their resolution, and go regularly to church, to the lecture, and to the social gatherings of their friends; but home duties increase with time, and the eagerness for society grows dull with neglect. Those who have started out with the firmest determination to avoid the rock on which their fathers have split, give up the struggle at last, and settle down to a humdrum, uninteresting, and uninterested performance of daily tasks.

In saying all this,—and I speak from experience, for I have led the dismal life myself,—it is hardly necessary to disclaim the least want of appreciation of the sterling qualities which have been developed in the American farm household. But it may be safely insisted that these qualities have been developed, not because of the American mode of farm life, but in spite of it; and, as I think over the long list of admirable men and women whose acquaintance I have formed on distant and solitary farms, I am more and more impressed with certain shortcomings which would have been avoided under better social conditions. If any of these is disposed to question the justice of this conclusion, I am satisfied to leave the final decision with his own judgment, formed after a fair consideration of what is herein suggested.

If American agriculture has an unsatisfied need, it is surely the need for more intelligence and more enterprising interest on the part of its working men and women. From one end of the land to the other, its crying defect—recognized by all—is, that its best blood, or, in other words, its best brains and its best energy, is leaving it to seek other fields of labor. The influence which leads these best of the farmers' sons to other occupations is not so much the desire to make more money, or to find a less laborious occupation, as it is the desire to lead a more satisfactory life,—a life where that part of us which has been developed by the better education and better civilization for which in this century we have worked so hard and so well, may find responsive companionship and encouraging intercourse with others.

It so happens that the few farm villages to which we can refer—such as Farmington, Hadley, and Deerfield—have become so attractive by means of their full-grown beauty, or have been so encroached upon by the wealth that has come over the district to which they belong, that they are no longer to be taken as types of pure country villages; nor do I recall a single village in the land which is precisely what I have now in mind.